Todd Gitlin

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“The Coming Dystopian Landscape Is All Too Real”

December 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sometimes what we think is the end of the world is actually just the end of an era. We’re certainly going through a foundational change now as the Computer Age disappears one stalwart after another of the Industrial Age. But the sinking feeling isn’t just about cultural transition. Reports from one NASA scientist after another tells us that something is seriously amiss environmentally.

Todd Gitlin has a TomDispatch piece about the latest plague and one that could “infect” us all simultaneously: climate change, which is slow and insidious, until it is brutal and devastating. The opening:

“Apocalyptic climate change is upon us. For shorthand, let’s call it a slow-motion apocalypse to distinguish it from an intergalactic attack out of the blue or a suddenly surging Genesis-style flood.

Slow-motion, however, is not no-motion. In fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down, turning risks into clumps of extreme fact, one catastrophe after another — even if there can be no 100% certitude about the origin of each one — the planetary future careens toward the unlivable. That future is, it seems, arriving ahead of schedule, though erratically enough that most people — in the lucky, prosperous countries at any rate — can still imagine the planet conducting something close to business as usual.

To those who pay attention, of course, the recent bursts of extreme weather are not ‘remote’ or ‘abstract,’ nor matters to be deferred until later in the century while we worry about more immediate problems. The coming dystopian landscape is all too real and it is already right here for many millions.”

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“But Movement Isn’t A Thing. It Isn’t, Itself, An Organization…It’s A Verb Seeking To Be A Noun”

October 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

"An ensemble of moving parts, very much in motion, each drawing upon the others and pressing upon them." (Image by David Shankbone.)

The always eloquent and insightful Todd Gitlin analyzes the Occupy Wall Street movement at the Los Angeles Review of Books. An excerpt: 

“But movement isn’t a thing. It isn’t, itself, an organization. It doesn’t have officers or headquarters. It’s a verb seeking to be a noun, yet fearful of hardening at the same time, for noun-things solidify, and anarchic energy afoot wants to be liquid, not so much a thing as a process: an ensemble of moving parts, very much in motion, each drawing upon the others and pressing upon them, each making their moves in the light of what others do, an ensemble of movement actors. There’s the inner movement, the outer movement, the politicians, the opposition — and, never forget, the police. They can do you favors, as did the NYPD, first with pepper spray, then with the Brooklyn Bridge mass arrest. But you can’t count on that.

The inner movement has a horizontally organized internal life: an amalgam of task forces and working groups operating under the awkward but so far workable discipline of direct democracy. A common sentiment in the public spaces, as far as I can make out, includes such deep suspicion of representative government — of the very principle of delegation — and such strong faith in the decision-making capacities of ordinary people, as to have invested all legitimate authority in the daily general assemblies.

‘Let the people decide’ was an early sixties slogan, but SDS never coherently knew what it meant, or even worried enough about not knowing. In the late ‘60s, when police bullhorns blared out arrest orders, ‘In the name of the people of California…,’ crowds shouted back, ‘We are the people.’ But we weren’t. In fact, a large majority of the people of California elected Ronald Reagan governor in 1966 and reelected him in 1970. The question of which people get to decide what: This is, of course, the master problem of political theory, and let’s just say I have no triumphant solution to offer here. It’s a problem that doesn’t go away. No matter the urgency, no matter the passion, no matter the circumstance, it just plain doesn’t go away. A serious movement has to be serious about it.”

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